Social science has an active role to play in driving positive consumer choices, says Philip Lowe.

Governments, including the UK’s, have signed up to the Kyoto Protocol and brought in domestic legislation with ambitious carbon reduction targets. But before we sit back and congratulate ourselves, shouldn’t we be thinking about exactly how we are to achieve real carbon reduction?

At the moment we are not only in danger of simply exporting our responsibilities by trading our emissions with less industrialised countries, but also failing to address the overall contribution that agriculture makes to climate change – at present the industry is responsible for 38 per cent of UK methane emissions – the vast majority from livestock management.

Climate change is a truly wicked problem on which we have to act not only globally, but on all fronts, if any real progress is to be made. And that means making real changes to our consuming and purchasing behaviour at the local level too.

Otherwise we risk falling for the rhetoric and missing the real point: are the ambitious targets we have set ourselves achievable, and are they compatible with our current approach to that other wicked problem of food security? Neither of these challenges can be approached as simply a technical problem for natural science to solve and they cannot be tackled in isolation.

Think global act local

If we are to have any real prospect of matching aspirations to actions – that is growing more food but with less energy and fewer emissions – social science has to be brought into the armoury and critical choices have to be made.

Until now, agriculture has seldom been challenged as a net producer of greenhouse gases. The industry, involving so many small producers, has seemed beyond government control, but in a changing climate it will have to play a more positive role.

The importance of peat bogs as a carbon sink, for example, is now clear and it is vital that these soils are maintained in good condition. Land use will also play a part in mitigation. As flooding events become more frequent, a more flexible approach to agricultural land management and payments to farmers for upstream flood storage might provide one means of helping to protect towns and cities.

New technologies might help us to carry on without major adjustments to our lifestyles, but will consumers accept them? We have already seen negative public reactions to issues such as GM crops where technology has moved faster than public awareness or understanding, and now intensification of production systems is provoking new debates about animal welfare.

Much more likely to be effective is socio-technological change, where lifestyles and technology change together in a complementary fashion, and this could be driven by consumers themselves.

Social science can help us to understand the decisions people make and how to influence them, and this includes decisions about food. For example, an interdisciplinary project investigating the implications of a nutrition-driven policy for the countryside as part of the Rural Economy and Land Use Programme, showed how taxing foods with high fat content and subsidising fruit and vegetables could improve diet in line with healthy eating guidelines.

Researchers also looked at the most effective ways of using advertising (PDF) to target the eating habits of specific social groups. If people who buy the food decide to eat more healthily, which could include less meat and move to more plant-based meals, that would itself cause the market to supply their needs, and achieve real change in the way land is managed, rather than driving production and emissions abroad.

Social science is the tool that can help us to understand how people make these kinds of small, everyday choices that have the potential to drive major change, and it could be the key to helping us achieve our ambitious targets.

About Philip Lowe

Philip Lowe is Director of the Rural Economy and Land Use (Relu) Programme of the UK Research Councils.

He has been a leading figure in the development of interdisciplinary rural studies in the UK. In 1992, he founded the Centre for Rural Economy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where he holds the Duke of Northumberland Chair of Rural Economy.

He is a former Scientific Chair of the European Society for Rural Sociology and a former member of the Science Advisory Council of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

He has played an active role in rural policy development at the national and European levels and in the North of England. For his contribution to the rural economy he was appointed OBE in 2003.

13 comments to 'Kind words butter no parsnips'

Harry Attrill22 February, 2011

Yet more fairly thinly disguised veggie propoganda. What about the nitrates (300 times more damaging than CO2) that are used to fertilise arable farms? I think most people (and most rural people in particular)are fed up (pun intended) of being preached at, patronised and manipulated by the latest crusade of the overeducated, underproducing, urbanised chattering classes. I blame the media. And their parents. And supermarkets. A knighthood for Fearnly Whittingstall!

Alan Woods22 February, 2011

Relu research is doing a useful job in looking at these sorts of issues from many angles – so that policy-makers get a rounded view and avoid falling for the lure of anyone’s pet cure-all. We all have a common interest in producing more food globally, and distributing it better, with fewer damaging environmental side effects (or ‘sustainable intensification’ as the new buzz-word has it). ALL the environmental issues need tackling – diffuse pollution, over-abstraction of water, NOx, NH3 and CH4 in air, NO3 and P in water, loss of biodiversity, loss of crop/livestock diversity, and so on, while at the same time getting smarter at producing food. We need a resilient and diverse agriculture which can deliver food whatever the changing climate throws at it (drought, flood, pests, etc). Researchers and farmers have a common interest here in marshalling evidence (rather than just opinion) to help policy-makers make the right decisions.

D.W. Yalden22 February, 2011

The biggest contribution to reducing our carbon usage would be if we could all limit our family size to 1.7 children, or fewer! That’s even less acceptable, socially and politically, that advocating a more herbivorous diet.

Bob Lee22 February, 2011

I’m a social psychologist and a farmer’s husband. Not many of us about! Just returned from running a full day session on Behaviour Change to 24 students on the Crichton Carbon Centre MSc on Applied Carbon Management. The course focuses on changing individual behaviour (your own and others), behaviour in organisations, in communities, in Scotland and internationally. Social science gives us plenty of ideas about how we might pursue behaviour change but no guarantees. Whilst I retain my optimism for humanity most of us in this field have black dog days!

As far as farmers are concerned beware the use of spurious ‘food security’ arguments to justify failing to take actions which reduce emissions.

Kelvin Pate22 February, 2011

I agree with Harry

On livestock and ammonia , a gas that breaks back down into co2 and water in a 12 year cycle I believe , and cattle .

Is CH4 therefore biodegradable ? , if so it can’t be treated like burning fossil fuel or Fertilizer ? (Same I suppose applies to ammonia from landfill)

What is more important , producing food from ground that can only grow grass , or only grow grass for the largest part of that grounds crop rotation .By doing the latter reducing the need to use nitrogen and other fertilizer

Thought for the day

Feeble23 February, 2011

one key element missing is that much of our country is not suitable for plant based food production. It is not a direct choice for many farmers between the two.

Therefore rather than focus on what we aspire to- perhaps we should look at what can actually be achieved with the resources we have – the hills and mountains are only suitable and cost effective for the production of meat. Therefore the impact of a more veggie based diet could increase imports and food miles and make the UK less food secure.
the earlier comment is correct this is very patronising and slips into what is a fashionable view.
most new flooding problems are a result of urban creep and poor planning decisions and less tolerance of nature. People need to be more risk aware if they live near a river,it is not a static thing it is very likely when it rains heavy they are going to get wet.

Don’t get me wrong I think people should eat more healthily obesity is a huge social cost and a massive burden on the NHS. however it is much more complex than simply eating more vegetables!!!

It is more that we are programmed to store fat reserves for winter, we no longer have to trek for miles on foot to get sufficient food to eat and we sit around in offices and don’t get much exercise.

food choices are not always about cost and are often about convenience, taste, habit, lack of cooking knowledge.

i think this article oversimplifies the issues around food production, food security and the human relationship with food and fails as a result to consider most of the factors that prevent the suggested way forward from working.

This theory definitely needs much more in depth consideration before putting anything down on paper.

Laudable, perhaps, however the challenge is far greater in terms of timescale than social behavioural change will allow.

Take smoking ~ decades of advertising/incentives/killer messages before there was a real impact on behaviour and only seriously after politicians felt comfortable introduction some additional legislation.

Take litter, 50 years ~ some improvement undoubtedly since 1950’s, the solution is easy, cheap and entirely do-able, yet CPRE has to bring in a celebrity to front a new campaign ~ after 50 years.

Health and safety in construction ~ better behavioural change but needed heavy legislation and an environment where one can instruct behaviour change.

So, a laudable aim but we don’t have time for it; it has to happen much much sooner. It does have to happen though because without behavioural change the supermarkets will continue to provide what we want (low cost, immediate food) and continue to stymy innovation in agriculture. The CAP of the EU does not help of course either.

I agree with Philip Lowe’s assessment that we need a stronger contribution from the social sciences in order to address the knotty problems of food security and climate change. The government’s current approach to ‘behaviour change’ seeks to provide consumers with the relevant information that will enable them to make more sustainable choices and to adopt to a healthier lifestyle. But decades of social science research has shown that there is a significant gap between knowledge and behaviour, and that the model of informed choice and individual responsibility is deeply flawed. The alternative is to recognise that dietary decisions (and other consumer ‘choices’) are socially embedded – based on routinised and habitual practices, on institutions and infrastructure that can only be changed by addressing the social dimensions of human behaviour (as Philip acknowledges in his reference to the need for ‘socio-technical change’). Social science has much to contribute to these weighty issues, moving beyond a ‘barriers and drivers’ approach to behaviour change and examining social practices in context.

By all means let us use social science to engage consumers in the choices they make: we at CLA have been campaigning on ‘Just Ask’ for some time.
But as previous commentators have wisely said, let us not make the mistake of exporting what is (largely) hugely efficient UK farming (our members have reduced GHG by 25% since 1990) for much more questionable imported produce – particularly as much of the new imported food would involve land use change in other countries – multiplying GHG to no benefit.

Marcus Sangster23 February, 2011

I’m with Alan Wood. I’m rather depressed that the recent report and subsequent rhetorics about global food shortages, which are actually to do with logistics rather than supply, is going to be used as a rationale to intensify agriculture even further, which will aggravate exactly the problems that Alan and Philip identify. Twelve years ago a DEFRA scientist asked me ‘How many songbirds do we need?’. The answer today is more than we had then and far more than we have now. Our soils, invertebrates, birds, mammals and broadleaved plants continue to decline despite DEFRA spending literally £billions with their client group on so-called environmental management.

Judith Hanna23 February, 2011

Another important social science angle in relation to food security is the question of how food supply matches up with people needing food. Food security isn’t a matter of simply producing more food, assuming that is the way to end starvation — various bodies have calculated that the amount of food crops currently harvested is enough for some 11bn people, nearly twice the current 6.1bn population level. Food shortages are a distribution problem, created by the economic and political systems by which societies run themselves. A ‘nutrition-based’ food and agriculture approach seems needed — one that calculates the nutritional requirements of the population, and treats production to match nutritional need as the success indicator, not simply increasing harvests at the expense of other ecosystem services.

Amanda Baker24 February, 2011

The United Nations Environment Programme have calculated that the calories lost by feeding grain to farmed animals worldwide represents the annual calorie needs of more than 3.5 billion humans.

There are significant benefits to be gained by taking a realistic look at stock-free farming (for food, fibre, fuel and many other resources) and also, plant-based nutrition – for individual health, global food security, and for ensuring social, economic and environmental sustainability.

Eric Audsley25 February, 2011

It is indeed the consumer not agriculture that is responsible for the level of GHG emissions. However if we produce less in the UK and import more, who is going hungry – who’s food are we stealing? The UK is actually very good at collecting the sun’s radiation because the land is (naturally) well watered – much overseas production uses unsustainable fossil water sources and large areas have no crop in the height of summer. Thus home production is a good use of our resources. (We seemed to have convinced the consumer that solar panels and windmills are good things for collecting the desperately needed sun’s energy, why not the land!) Eat more fruit and veg? – we are 11% self sufficient in fruit and 50% in veg versus 80% in beef, so this is contra to home production. Organic? – yields are lower (yes they are), so this is contra to home production. Become veggie? – where do you get your protein but imported from overseas, so this is contra to home production. (The historic ‘meat and two veg’ meal is for a good reason; meat is the UK protein source) Tax food? – we could also try taxing air travel and car fuel to see if that reduces GHG! – is it working or is the rise in oil prices more significant. Did you buy any cut flowers for Valentine’s Day?